I see people buy companies and it confuses me because I think that they're so easy to start.

All companies built in three key areas, sales, finance, operations.

Don't ever make long-term decisions for short-term issues or short-term thinking.

Like many entrepreneurs, I'm not good at saying no to a good opportunity. I'm the problem there.

My name is Mike Otis. I'm in the Grand Rapids Michigan area.

I do as one of my sons like to say, monopoly and legos, construction and real estate development and rental.

I have technically four companies, three real estate holding companies, and then one, my primary company, my day job, is company that does commercial window-endor projects that I started 20 years ago.

We take the window-endor portion of commercial construction jobs, office building, schools, apartment complex, student housing, your house, all those kinds of projects.

That's what I do for a living. How did you end up getting into that?

I really have been in Windows and Doors from one angle or another in my whole life. My dad installed glass or he was called a glazer throughout his career.

My family tends to have a natural benton building things anyway. That felt to me. I got that bug.

I remember as a little kid going to a Saturday morning, maybe going to help my dad. I was probably as wet.

Going to be with my dad on a window-endor project he was working on or installed some glass. One of them was a bank, I recall.

I grew up around it. My whole life, my dad started a small company at his house when I was a teenager.

He had nice, small meaning, him alone, no employees, part-time and shut it down for a few months, go in and winter time.

So I was around it a bit, naturally took to it. I think my first job I actually took contracting for a customer where I was a contract or was re-ropping a shed,

a little ways down the road from where I lived and I was 13 years old.

From in 13, you went to New Tribes Institute, girl, look, I'm looking at it.

That's true. I went to school for ministry. That was my education. To learn how to live out in the jungles with a primitive people group and learn their language and their culture and break it down into a written form and teach them reading and writing.

Translate the Bible into their language, all that stuff, establish a church and then just, you know, one thing led to another and I never followed that path.

Was all that Michigan or wherever you translating that stuff?

Well, I went to school for it. It was in three different states and began in Jackson, Michigan then in Pennsylvania for a year and a half and then Missouri for six months.

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